Food stamp recipients facing tougher rules

Some fear stricter enforcement of work requirements for assistance could compound problems for many

Sep. 13, 2013

William Pollard, 8, lives in the East End area of Cincinnati with his father, Monty. The single dad depends on food stamps to keep food in the house for his young third grader. Monty works part-time in janitorial service, but would like to work more to provide for his son. / Liz Dufour/The Cincinnati Enquirer

Written by

Mark Curnutte

The Cincinnati Enquirer

CINCINNATI — A few years ago, at the start of the recession, Monty Pollard got divorced. He then lost his full-time job as a painter and handyman, which had paid $13.50 an hour with health and retirement benefits.

He now works part-time — about 22 hours a week — for $10 an hour as a janitor at a bar. Pollard, 45, a single father, receives $328 a month in food stamps for himself and his 8-year-old son, William.

“It helps me put food in my house because everything I make either goes to pay the landlord or the gas and electric,” said Pollard, who rents part of a small house in the East End neighborhood of Cincinnati and describes life on food stamps this way: “You don’t eat three meals a day.”

His path is an increasingly worn one throughout Ohio over the past five years. “Food insecurity” and “low food security” households — essentially, the number of people who aren’t sure when they will eat the next meal — are higher in the state than national levels, even as record numbers of people in Ohio depend on food stamps, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

Food insecurity measures households where food intake and eating patterns are disrupted by a lack of money or other resources. Ohio’s rate of 16.1 percent of food-insecure households is the third highest nationally. It’s also higher than the national rate of 14.7 percent, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.

Yet these are not unemployed people — “moochers,” as some SNAP critics say — or people who’ve given up the job search. These are the working poor, their children and people who are disabled. SNAP is the only public aid that 85 percent of Ohio’s 1.82. million SNAP recipients receive. That number is up 57 percent from the prerecession number of 1.15 million in 2007.

Work requirements

Program changes are coming both in Ohio and across the country.

Beginning Nov. 1, the nearly 48 million people in the U.S. who receive food stamps will get less. That’s when a provision in the 2009 federal stimulus bill will expire; for Monty and Will Pollard, that’s $26 a month less.

“We’ll feel that,” Monty said.

And starting Oct. 1 in Ohio, about 130,000 able-bodied adult food stamp recipients without dependent children — including 518 in Crawford County — across 72 of the state’s 88 counties will again have to prove they spend 20 hours a week working, attending qualified job-readiness program or volunteering to receive the benefit.

Ohio had qualified again for a statewide waiver to the federal work requirement, which limits SNAP benefits to nonworking people to only three months in a three-year period. Instead, Gov. John Kasich’s administration kept the waiver in place in just 16 counties, most of them in the Appalachian part of the state and where the two-year unemployment rate for 2011 and 2012 exceeded 120 percent of the national unemployment average. These counties have almost exclusively white populations — in four, the number of African-American residents is less than 1 percent — far from the statewide black population of 12.5 percent.

But in Hamilton, Cuyahoga, Franklin and Ohio’s other urban counties, the rate of black unemployment is roughly 200 percent higher than the national overall rate and jobs and work sites are as potentially scarce as in impoverished rural counties.

“Gov. Kasich’s administration will add to the despair and plight which engulfs many African-Americans,” said Bobby Hilton, senior pastor of Word of Deliverance church in Forest Park and president of the Greater Cincinnati chapter of the National Action Network, the civil rights group founded 20 years ago by the Rev. Al Sharpton. “I question why Appalachian counties are exempt while urban, largely African-American counties must face this change.”

It’s because Ohio’s Department of Job and Family Services is active in urban neighborhoods in counties where the overall unemployment rate is in line with or less than the state average, said ODJFS spokesman Benjamin Johnson. Further, he said, in 2014-15 the state budget will add $42 million in new spending to work supports — bus tokens, gas cards, money for car repairs and even rent subsidies — to remove work barriers for people needing to re-enter and stay in the workforce.

“We want to help all Ohioans not just get work but sustain work,” Johnson said.

Adults older than 50 and those with dependent children or a physical or mental disability that prevents them from working are exempt from the SNAP work requirement, which dates to 1996 and Clinton-era welfare reform.

No food stamp benefits will be suspended until after Jan. 1.

“If they’re not participating, they’ll just fall off the rolls,” said Kevin Holt, section chief for workforce development for the Hamilton County Department of Job and Family Services. “We have the opportunity to work with people over the next three months.”

Hurdles to overcome

People who receive food assistance say they already face a number of program regulations to maintain eligibility, and, they say, those requirements don’t count the stigma they experience in the grocery store checkout line.

“It’s embarrassing. It’s kind of degrading,” said Pollard, whose son is a bright third-grader at Riverview East Academy in Cincinnati. “I do it so he doesn’t have to do without. If I had my choice, I wouldn’t even be on it.”

Pollard, who works, is not alone in his plight. Marilyn Tomasi, vice president of public affairs for the Mid-Ohio Foodbank, said 40 percent of people who go to food banks in her group’s service area work.

“They have to work two to three jobs because they cannot get enough hours at a single place,” she said. “They are not able to dig themselves out of poverty.”

Tomasi said she isn’t opposed to work requirements for able-bodied adults, but the state must have jobs for them to go to.

Those SNAP recipients with major employment barriers — a felony record, little work history, no car or access to public transportation — can find qualifying volunteer activities in their neighborhood religious community or school, Johnson said.

Meanwhile, seemingly far away from the struggles of the working poor, the federal food stamp program has become politicized. In July, House Republicans signaled plans to curtail benefits by narrowly passing a farm bill that didn’t include food stamp re-authorization. The move drew immediate Democratic criticism and threats of a presidential veto. Money will almost certainly be found to maintain SNAP in a separate bill, but even the prospect of cuts is chilling in a region where nearly one in eight residents already collects food stamps.

SNAP benefits can be spent only on eligible items and cannot be used to buy alcohol, tobacco or restaurant food. Agencies in the Ohio Association of Food Banks are bracing for even more demand atop of rising need. The loss of federal stimulus money into SNAP will reduce the average individual’s allowance by $21 and a family of four’s allotment by $67, according to Cincinnati-area food bank officials.

It isn’t just SNAP recipients who benefit from the program. Many economists, echoing a study by Moody’s Economy.com, said every $1 of the food stamp stimulus investment generated $1.73 throughout the economy, including salaries for grocery store workers and drivers who haul food.

Ohio ranks 10th nationally as the state where most people go hungry, according to the agriculture department. Tomasi said Ohio is losing ground to other states, with food insecurity growing at the third highest rate in the nation.

“The problem is getting worse in Ohio and the demand is getting greater,” she said.